Looking for a job is never
easy. You can’t always be as choosy as you would like to be. I know I wanted to
use French at my work, both written and spoken. However, job markets require
that we all make a lot of compromises and consequently, we accept things that
stray from what is better suited for us. I am certainly not an exception to
this. For a few years, I worked in a large multinational in Ville-St-Laurent
with colleagues that were about 80% anglophone. That bothered me, as I didn’t
come to live in Québec to end up in the same environment I had in the United
States.
I suppose it could be
considered normal that it was so overwhelmingly anglophone, since the written
documentation for the project on which we were working was to be produced in
English. So I rather begrudgingly went to work, often saddened on the inside
that I had to listen to all these anglophones drone on and on all around me. I
would ask myself : “What am I doing? Why did I come here? I might as well have
stayed in the US where I was comfortable and knew my way around, because this
office environment is exactly the same as one in back home (or Ontario, or
Manitoba, or Texas, or anywhere else).”
On a more mundane level, it
was weird hearing things called the Champlain Bridge or Nun’s
Island (instead of how I was used to calling them, le pont Champlain and
Île-des-Sœurs). On a level a bit more complex, because I talked in the same
language and accent, these people usually thought I was one of them. So they
spoke rather freely around me regarding Quebecers : “Anne-Sophie is stupid and
makes so many mistakes in her English” or “Quebecers are racist” or “Pauline
Marois is cunt who should die”… At some point, one of them put up a huge
Canadian flag on the office wall. I talked about putting up a Québec flag,
which was greeted with a “oh, I didn’t know you were a separatist.” Something
tells me that putting up a Franco-Ontarian, Catalan, Scottish or Norwegian flag
would have been just fine though.
One time I got into something
of a discussion with this second-generation-says-she’s-Greek colleague of mine
about how little she knew about Québec popular culture (Québec media
personalities/actors/singers/authors). Actually, she couldn’t name any (though
she had heard of Mitsou…). Despite her complete lack of knowing anything about
the cultural life of Québec and Montréal, in her own little head, she is a true
Montrealer, much more so than I could ever hope to be. She also thought that
Quebecers were racist.
Another person I worked with
was a second generation francophone/allophone whose parents were Hungarian. She
is what the media calls an enfant de la loi 101—with no allegiance to the
Québec nation. Like most of the enfants, she views English and French
languages as exactly the same and does whatever is the easiest while out in the
world. Unfortunately, the French Language Charter, law 101 (or bill 101 as the
anglophone media calls it, even though it hasn’t been a bill since 1977) hasn’t
been as successful at making francophone Quebecers instead of bilingual
Canadians. They can interact without any problems with their host society, to
the point of getting all the societal codes and unsaid aspects, but they refuse
that society’s grand ambitions. And this colonized reflex to celebrate and
applaud those who despise their host society (such as Sugar Sammy), without
paying any attention to the facts, makes them look down upon Quebecers as a
conquered people with the confidence of the dominant, dafault party.
Then there was the anglophone
Annabella of Italian origins, a huge busybody, always organizing Panini lunches
and collecting money for this or that social gathering, a third of the time
speaking in an English-heavy franglais, the rest of the time in English, all
the while claiming to be perfectly bilingual, telling me that Montrealers say
“Park Avenue” and not Avenue du parc. Another Montréal stereotype could be
found in the actually-from-China Chinese dude, always purring in a sing-song
accented English, not knowing a word of French and being very impressed that I
could speak it. That however is less common than the self-flagellating
francophone.
One francophone woman spoke
with an accent in English as well as making plenty of mistakes in both written
and spoken English. However, she prided herself on her English identity and
considered herself anglophone, with a French side, because as a sickly child,
she spent a considerable amount of time at the anglophone Montréal Children’s
hospital (as opposed to the much larger francophone children’s hospital
Sainte-Justine) which, in her mind, made her an anglophone. Other whipped
francophones coming to mind was one who particularly crushed his French origins
in a very Trudeau-esque way, which I found more heartbreaking than infuriating.
The angryphones were the
funniest though. Sometimes, when the subject of Québec or the French language
came up, they got so hysterical that you’d think francophones were drowning
puppies and torturing kittens. At a team spirit building get together one
evening, some months after the 2012 Québec elections, Mitch was spitting fire
about how the province was still filled with a bunch of racists
who still vote for that racist party (the PQ). When I questioned his
own integration, he said he was from a generation where people didn’t do that.
Okay, whatever… what about your two kids? Why don’t you send them to French
school and speak English to them at home? Oh, the horror! He said they would
never learn to read or write in English at the French school, never mind that
our allophone second generation Hungarian immigrant colleague was able to do
it, along with countless others. Besides, he had heard that the French schools
were of inferior quality.
There was the banal and
formulaic James, who barely can muster a sentence or two in French, but was
always spouting hockey metaphors (“I want this mandate to be a puck in the
net”). Can’t forget that oaf Ben, a Homer Simpson type who wanted Madame Marois
to “suffer a horrible death” or that dreadful Ontarian woman, now living in NDG
(it’s too much work for anglophones to say Notre-Dame-de-Grâce) with an
aggressive, anti-Québec attitude, however married to another one of those
self-erasing francophones.
Of all of them in that
office, Natalie really took the cake. A rather dull and silly Ontarian, married
to what she called a “Franco-American” (whatever that means—I could be
considered a Franco-American, being that my mom’s family comes from Québec and
I grew up in the United States). She took herself very seriously and was always
touting her Concordia education (?) and expertise in the work we were doing.
When talking about protecting French in Anglophone North America, she retorted
in a tone of profound wisdom: “why can’t Francophones just be bilingual?” That
way, she reasoned, they can have the best of both worlds. She didn’t have
anything wise to say about herself though, when I asked about her own missing
out on the best of both worlds (she didn’t speak French either).
I did have a soft spot for
one of them though, a certain Dorothy, about 20 years older than me, living in
Montréal-Ouest with her husband and young son. We got along really well from
day one. Had we worked together outside of Québec, there really wouldn’t have
been any problem between us. Nevertheless, when it came to Québec and French,
she fell into the same trap as the majority of anglophones. To give her credit,
she did speak it a little, with a heavy accent and hardly any vocabulary. She
was sending her son to French school and hired a tutor to help him with his
written and spoken French. She was more open than other people of her ilk, she
just naïvely believed in the idea of “Canada”. Her husband was a nice person
too, from New Brunswick. He too fell into that tired old anti-francophone trap,
talking about how Acadians kept their distance and “wanted nothing to do with
us”. Probably a gross exaggeration, especially when the Acadians are all
bilingual and are used to working with Anglophones. He is just another
unilingual soul in the anglophone mass culture. Seriously, who’s got a bad
track record regarding hostility—Acadians or anglophones?
Now I must add that
Montréal’s anglophones, as people, are not bad. They are ordinary working
folks, trying to make ends meet and to get along in the hectic modern world.
It’s true that they live in a bubble and if you remove the fact that they are
contributing to the slow but sure destruction of Québec, whether they can see
it or not, they are nothing more than the ordinary, run-of-the-mill populace
found all over the North American continent. They could make themselves at home
just about anywhere in North America. What about Quebecers? Aside from
Montréal, what other important metropolis is there for the North American
French speaker? Anglophones have their English language mass culture
everywhere. Why do they think they are special and under attack from a nation
of 7 million when they are over 300 million? Isn’t it plain as day that what
deserves protection are the francophone institutions?
Why don’t anglophones take an
interest in their surrounding community? Do they not realize that without
French, Montréal would be just another North American anglophone city? If they
valued Montréal’s difference, why don’t they help contribute to that said
difference, instead of indirectly destroying it? They harp on and on about
diversity and accepting everyone. Why can’t they see that North America’s
French-speaking society is real diversity?
Anyone who isn’t a hysterical
anglophone living in Montréal, frothing at the mouth when spoken to in French,
can see that.
